Friday, June 28, 2013

Unless Congress acts, interest rates for government subsidized student loans will double to 6.8% from 3.4% on July 1. In May, House Republicans passed a bill that would index rates on new loans to the rate on 10-year Treasurys (currently about 2.6%), plus 2.5 percentage points, with an 8.5% cap. But with little Democratic support in the Senate, that bill is dead in the water.

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If we want to solve the very real problem of excessive student-loan debt, college costs need to be brought under control. A 2010 study by the Goldwater Institute identified "administrative bloat" as a leading reason for higher costs. The study found that many American universities now have more salaried administrators than teaching faculty.

Monday, June 24, 2013

MOOCs are the video games of 2013. Everyone is talking about them, there's a lot of hysteria and a lot of nonsense surrounding them. (Remember back when "Grand Theft Auto" was the end of civilization as we knew it?). Pundits and media analysts are having a hyperbolic field day over MOOCs. Nervous administrators and excited VCs are making rash decisions without evidence that MOOCs are an effective way either to educate students or to save costs (or, for that matter, to make a quick return on your investments). Over and over, MOOC Mania is swamping lessons learned over the last decades from all the other kinds and forms of creative, interactive online learning, distance education, continuing education, and open peer-to-peer learning. Faculty are freaking out because suddenly MOOCs are the only thing anyone seems to be talking about. It's a takeover! The zombie apocalypse comes to academe! The problem is that, as with the video game hysteria, all the excitement distracts us from the seriousness and the range of problems and exciting possibilities for open, online, and classroom learning that deserve our serious attention.

So, for my own satisfaction and that of anyone who wants to play with me, I’m teaching a MOOC of my own beginning in January 2014 on "The History and Future of Higher Education" in which MOOCs are one of the subject we'll be discussing. Further, many of us around the world are planning face-to-face courses, workshops, seminars and events on some version of that same topic in order to offer as many possibilities for critical thinking about education today and to posit some creative contributions to the store of ideas about MOOCs. My own face-to-face students will be studying what is happening in the Coursera MOOC and participating in the global forums.

In addition, a team of face-to-face doctoral students and faculty members will be doing research on the MOOC and on the face-to-face co-located offerings (students, costs, labor, numbers, learning outcomes, assessment methods, responses, feedback, interaction, and the overall impact of the MOOC on the institutional structure of the universities: do they replace, substitute, duplicate, extend, undermine, or reinforce what happens at the universities that offer them? are they a serious threat to present and future professors or something else?). We don't know the answers. We don't know what we will find out from our research but that is the difference between research and punditry: we will be studying and posing questions and not simply reacting (and over-reacting). [If you want to know more about this project, you can read about it here: http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2013/06/22/historyfuture-mostly-higher-education-mooc-week-one-progress-report- and here: http://hastac.org/collections/history-and-future-higher-education ]

Here’s what I believe to be true so far in my initial wading into MOOC waters.

1. MOOCs are not the real threat to the future of higher education:

· Figures we’ve seen that it takes about 150 hours of work to prepare 1 Week’s Coursera lessons are holding true for us as well. Coursera’s model is elite profs at elite universities teaching the masses. How many of those profs really are going to spend 150 hours shooting video from a DIY webcam? Really? It’s taking as much time to do this course as it would to write another book. How many profs will choose the course over the book? Really. Think about it.

· I am told it will take even more time once the course is actually running. This is not a viable labor model and it doesn’t get faster in the future. See first bullet point above. This is not the model that will put public universities and small private colleges out of business and steal jobs from current and future professors.

· It costs a lot. Perhaps even too much to be attractive to VC’s in the long run if all those VC's want is a quick return on investment rather than a serious investment in quality higher education. It’s not clear how some of the models are even a sustainable business model. (In a recent analysis by Christopher Newfield, published by Insider Higher Ed (http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/06/24/essay-sees-missing-savings-georgia-techs-much-discussed-mooc-based-program), of the Udacity contract with Georgia Tech to offer an online Master's of Engineering, the numbers should make anyone think carefully about business model. Quality online education is not free. Having run the peer-to-peer online hastac.org network for a decade, we know that online interactivity does not run by itself but requires labor, hardware, human and physical resources and is anything but "free." Part of my skepticism about the business model of MOOCs and how much threat to face-to-face education they will turn out to be in the long run is based on knowing how much time and funding goes into having run and sustained a 12,000-member online network. I believe (and Udacity seems based on this assumption too) that the most sustainable MOOCs will be offering an alternative, not a replacement, to f2f education and to a different audience. I may be wrong. This is early and it's just a guess. What I do know is that it takes some magical thinking (ie. the ridiculous panic of the UVA trustees last summer is a good example) to believe that, if it is online, it is necessarily cheaper. it's more complex than that.

· The audience for Coursera-style MOOCs is not the traditional college audience nor the traditional “returning student” model. From what I’ve seen so far from others and from the research, 70-75% of MOOC students would not take any kind of standard college course for reasons of cost, time, schedule, location, mobility, access, ability/disability, prerequisites, prior degrees.

2. Here’s an array of factors that pose more significant and extensive threats to the future of higher education:

External threats:

Neoliberalism's determination to shrink the middle class. If you want a society of the so-called 1% (more like .5%), a shrunken middle class, and a large lower class, education will shrink as will the long-standing conviction that education is the ladder into the middle-class. This is a social tragedy.
The concomittant focus on de-funding public education (K-22) is a real and significant threat to the future of the university globally. It represents an appalling social disregard for the productive future, not only of youth, but of the elderly whose increasingly long retirements will be sustained by a prosperous workforce.
The techno-cratic (and neoliberal again) conviction that corporate interests will make up the gap left by public funding by delivering education more efficiently, with more innovation, and less overhead than universities (public or private) can do. (Really--I've not heard of many former CEOs who come to head up universities at a reduced salary or whose tenure as university president reduces either tuition costs or overall operating costs. There may be some but I've not heard of any.)
The over-reliance on STEM, without stressing the importance of the humanities and social science in contributing to our understanding of an era of extreme and rapid change (including the lessons of history, the powerful analyses offered by artists and writers and filmmakers to our ability to understand our world and its many cultures and social forms). This division of knowledge into STEM and non-STEM subject matter is an archaic aspect being promoted by policy makers, a carry-over from an older silo'd knowledge-structure (see below).

Internal threats:

The intransigence of university administrators and professors in rethinking the system and apparatus and assumptions of education inherited from the Industrial Age for this era is a real and significant threat.
Archaic institutions that fight for the status quo do not ensure their own future success.
o Silo’d, discrete, disciplinary divisions of knowledge (going back to Diderot and institutionalized by the founding of the post-Humboldtian research university) does not map onto current ways of working or living in the world. (NB: is a “web developer” someone with a degree in computer science or design or cognitive psychology? Is an “event planner” a website designer? Is an art and art history prof a webmaster? Is a geneticist trained in ethics? You name a field today and it is likely multidisciplinary.)

o Many fields—from Computer Science to English—act as if the Internet hasn’t been invented yet. Many CS departments consider web-based programming (HTML, HTML 5, Javascript, or Content Management Systems such as Drupal) irrelevant to their students. Many English Departments take no responsibility for the everyday reading and writing of their students online (who is teaching privacy, security, identity, IP, and other “digital literacies” in an era of everyday self-publishing)?

The bloated administrative costs of running universities today is a real and significant threat to the future.
o Former corporate and government officials serving as top university administrators with very large salaries has forced all universities to compete by redistributing resources to the top, without evidence that this corporate recruitment trend has proven beneficial to universities.

o But it is not just CEO salaries--it’s also the cost of running innovative new programs that are relevant to students’ future lives while also sustaining the traditional silo’d disciplines.

o Parallel administrative structures are costly.

· The investment of huge research universities in enormous research facilities partially funded by corporate, federal, and state grants with indirect costs coming back to central administration may have been cost-effective in the 1990s but the rapid withdrawal of funds from those sectors makes these costly investments with very high overhead.

· The non-educational social apparatus of universities (sports teams, recreational facilities, extracurricular programs, outreach and in-reach programs) contributes to high tuition costs and may or may not (this is a subject worthy of serious critical thinking and research, not knee-jerk punditry) have long-term educational and learning benefit.

· The technologizing of every aspect of education costs far more than people ever think it will and requires more not less human labor than previously.

The reliance on circular metrics for success, excessive regulation, standardized testing (SATs, GREs) and the lack of clarity about what really constitutes learning (in all fields) compromises higher education’s effectiveness and adds to costs

By

PHILADELPHIA -- The more conspiracy-minded of professors probably think that whenever college presidents and other senior administrators talk among themselves at conferences or out-of-the-way meetings, they bemoan the extent to which faculty involvement in decision making impairs their ability to make quick decisions and move nimbly.

They wouldn't be entirely wrong. That has become a familiar theme in certain circles in recent years, especially at confabs organized around the idea of higher education "disruption" and the need for colleges to dramatically transform what they do in the face of financial and technological pressures. Many of those conversations would make the average professor's blood boil.

But a different kind of discussion unfolded Saturday at the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Attorneys here, at a session provocatively titled "The New Normal in University and Faculty Governance: Are You With Us, Against Us, or Both?"

Yes, administrative perspectives dominated the conversation, and like many other such discussions, it was underpinned by the idea that colleges and universities are facing intense pressures that will require them to respond in meaningful, and possible speedy, ways.

The consensus, though, seemed to be that while it would continue to be strained and might need to be tweaked to allow campus leaders to consult more speedily with all relevant parties, the system of shared governance not only can -- but absolutely must -- survive if higher education is to retain its essential character.

"Reasoned collegial governance is important; it's why we’re talking about it here. It's the essence of what we mean in higher education by 'learned community,' " said Richard Levao, president of Bloomfield College, in New Jersey. "If the community forgets that faculty energy, and even faculty combativeness, is the essence of higher education, then we lose something very, very precious."

Mounting Evidence of a Problem

Quantifying that clashes over academic governance are increasing is difficult -- but Bruce Melton, associate general counsel of the University of Chicago, took a worthy shot at it in preparing for the NACUA session. Scouring the higher ed headlines, he cited reports that 61 college presidents had been publicly ousted since 2009, and that pace seems to be accelerating.

That count of departed presidents doesn't include the situation that for many has become the embodiment of the pressures on higher education governance, last year's conflagration at the University of Virginia, which President Teresa M. Sullivan survived. Factor in, too, recent votes of no confidence of presidents at New York University and elsewhere, and disagreements over the creation of international programs and online learning initiatives at institutions such as Duke University.

Melton, who undertook his study of academic governance in the wake of debate at his institution over the role of faculty members in approving new institutes and centers, saw in the conflict among boards, presidents and faculty evidence of mounting financial and technological pressures on higher education.

"In the context of these stresses, and maybe because of them, stakeholders are becoming more engaged," he said. "What happens when a bunch of stressed people become more engaged? The rules of engagement become more important."

There is enormous variation in the underlying factors of these disputes, but panelists saw some key patterns in them.

"Administrations feel like they must increase the pace of change," said Bloomfield's Levao, "because they fear that if they're late to the market, they become essentially irrelevant. You combine that with a growing, well-organized current, politically driven, that seeks to dismantle the western tradition of higher education that is also a threat. Along with that there are pressures from governors and others who demand we talk about the alignment of curricula to meet work force needs -- legitimate, but still another pressure."

In the situations at NYU and Duke, administrators moved aggressively in academically related areas (the creation of new academic programs, new modes of instructional delivery) in which the shared governance model has traditionally given faculty members their most significant influence, said Barbara A. Lee, professor of human resource management at Rutgers University and an expert on higher education law.

"When the administration gets ahead of the faculty, faculty are understandably concerned and upset about that," Lee said.

And in some of those situations and others, Melton said, one can see signs of "a lot of failure of process," with administrators deciding to act without consulting appropriately with faculty leaders or others with a stake in the decision. "People can accept that these are tough times; where they’re pretty unforgiving is when people give up the basics."

But the questions of which issues faculty members should have a say in, and what role they should play in those matters, are increasingly fractious. If there ever was a "bright line" between issues that were academic (in which the faculty has a primary role) and those that involve colleges' strategic direction or financial futures, said Bloomfield's Levao, it no longer exists.

"What we’ve seen recently in some of the no confidence votes," said Lee of Rutgers, "is that some faculty have the misperception that consultation means acquiescence, that recommendations equal decisions." Faculty groups have a right to be consulted on many issues, but ultimate decision-making authority rests with the president, she said.

Richard D. Legon, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, acknowledged that as governing boards and presidents feel "pressure for change and the need to act more rapidly than has traditionally been the norm," some of them are concluding that a process of “shared governance that took 18 months” may no longer be as viable.

But the panelists, by and large, said that while acknowledging the need for speedier change may require changes in how shared governance operates, abandoning it would be disastrous.

"I don't see the basic method of governance as being out of date just because we're in a hurry," said Melton of Chicago.

"Collaborative governance is the bedrock of what makes the [higher ed] system unique," said Legon.

Faculty consultation may need to happen differently, he and others said, with greater dependence on the faculty's representative leaders and fewer institutional decisions that must wait until a vote at the bimonthly meeting of the full faculty.

But procedural changes won't suffice; "ultimately this is not going to be a jurisdictional question," said Levao, who described the breakdown in shared governance as mostly a communication problem.

"Presidents are no longer the intellectual leaders of campus, because we are perceived as different from them," given escalating executive salaries and the external focus of many campus leaders.

"We need to pay a lot more attention to the interpersonal side," he said. "It has more to do with the art side than the science side."

Presidents and other institutional leaders should be talking much more with professors, Lee said -- especially those with alternative points of view.

"Some presidents tend to isolate themselves from faculty, and focus outward," she said. "Presidents and other high-level administrations need to talk to faculty who don’t agree with them," even though it's “very tempting and much more comfortable” to talk to people who share one's point of view.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

New Test to Measure Faculty Collegiality Produces Some Dissension Itself

Avital Greener for The Chronicle

Robert E. Cipriano is an emeritus professor at Southern Connecticut U. who has helped develop a tool for measuring the collegiality of individual professors.

By Peter Schmidt

Can a written test determine whether a faculty member is a bully or a jerk or an all-around pain in the neck?

Two higher-education consultants believe they have an instrument that does just that. They call it the Collegiality Assessment Matrix, and they are promoting it to colleges as a tool for both professional development and faculty evaluations.

The two consultants, Jeffrey L. Buller, dean of the honors college at Florida Atlantic University, and Robert E. Cipriano, a professor emeritus of recreation and leisure studies at Southern Connecticut State University, say the test offers something colleges have long needed: a reliable means of identifying good and bad behavior in the academic workplace.

'It's My Business'
June 13, 2013
By
Colleen Flaherty
WASHINGTON -- Intellectual property battles in the MOOC age are a “last stand” in the fight for academic freedom, a longtime evangelist of the topic told university professors here Wednesday.

The American Association of University Professors said on Thursday it was “deeply concerned” about what it said was the redefinition of sexual harassment proposed in the University of Montana at Missoula’s recent agreement with federal officials to resolve an investigation of the institution’s handling of sexual-assault cases.

The association raised its concerns in a letter to Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil-rights division, and Russlynn H. Ali, the U.S. Department of Education’s former assistant secretary for civil rights.

The AAUP’s letter praises the two officials, whose departments collaborated on the investigation at the Montana flagship campus, for directing the institution to revise its policies “in order to create a more equitable campus environment for women.”

But the letter states that the AAUP is also “deeply concerned” about what some critics have said is the agreement’s expanded definition of sexual harassment. That expansion, the AAUP wrote, “eliminates the critical standard of ‘reasonable speech,’ and, in so doing, may pose a threat to academic freedom in the classroom.”

The AAUP warned that, under the proposed redefinition of sexual harassment, certain classroom topics that might offend student sensibilities—such as breastfeeding and abortion— “could easily become taboo in a range of classes where such content is appropriate.” The letter urges the government to clarify its position on the broader definition of sexual harassment, “in order to emphasize the special protection due academic freedom in the classroom.”

Thursday, June 6, 2013

LECTURE halls can seat only so many students, but it's easy enough to broadcast lectures online to tens of thousands. Ventures such as EdX, a non-profit consortium involving a dozen universities, and Coursera, a for-profit business, are now focused on making courses taught by outstanding instructors available to millions of students. Some universities are using these so-called MOOCs, short for "massively open online courses", to supplement their standard curriculum, and the possibility that these offerings may in time replace flesh and blood university professors has become a source of distress among academics.

By

Some faculty leaders were surprised this week when state systems and flagship universities in nine states announced a series of new business partnerships with Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based ed tech company.

The universities plan to work with Coursera, a provider of massive open online courses, to try out a variety of new teaching methods and business models, including MOOCs and things that are not MOOCs. Administrators and the company hailed the effort as new way to improve education. Some administrators said the faculty were involved or were part of the effort and the contracts themselves make clearfaculty have some decision-making authority.

But some faculty leaders were nevertheless caught off-guard by the deals that were widely reported Thursday in national and local media. Some faculty accused Coursera and the state-funded universities of working together to experiment on students.

On the other end of the spectrum, some faculty had talked beforehand with administrators about the deal and were cautiously optimistic the arrangements could create new opportunities for students. Still, even they warned, there were lines both the company and the universities should not cross without further faculty involvement.

“We are concerned that there is an experiment being done on students and we don’t know the outcome but it could jeopardize their higher education,” said Eileen Landy, the elected secretary of United University Professions, the bargaining union for faculty at 30 of the State University of New York’s 64 campuses. She said union leaders were left in the dark until the deal was announced and said there could be collective bargaining implications of the new arrangements.

SUNY hopes to use Coursera to help with an effort to enroll 100,000 more students over the next several years. Administrators portrayed that effort, known as Open SUNY, as having faculty support.

Ken O'Brien, the president of the SUNY system's University Faculty Senate, which has a less contentious relationship with administrators than the union, said there was not broad consultation with system faculty before SUNY signed with Cousera.

He first heard about negotiations with Coursera two months ago. He said faculty at Stony Brook University, where the talks began, should look carefully at any deal. He was told that they did.

"The initiative may well be 'top-down,' but the real decisions on how these technologies will be employed [...] will be made in our departments, on our campuses," O'Brien wrote in an email to faculty Friday morning.

In a telephone interview, he said the contract with Coursera was non-binding and did not compel faculty to do anything. Still, he said the senate and the union may use different language but have the same goals -- but it would be up to the union to deal with any labor issues.

"If there are particular issues that arise in that regard, the union handles it, period, end of story," he said. "What we do on the governance side is we are really concentrating on campus governance and particularly the way faculty are able to write, deliver and evaluate curriculum."

The MOOC Moment

A free, print-on-demand booklet of Inside Higher Ed articles and essays about MOOCs may be found here.

In Georgia, Christine Ziegler, the president of the state's conference of the American Association of University Professors and professor at ​Kennesaw State University, said she was unaware of significant faculty consultation in advance of the state system's plan to partner with Coursera.

"As an individual faculty person I am personally opposed to the MOOC concept as are many of my colleagues but as to whether faculty have been consulted, that has not occurred as far as I know," she said in an e-mail.

The four-campus University of Colorado system has a 30-person task force -- including faculty -- looking at technology, but the head of the Boulder campus’s Faculty Assembly said he was surprised by the announcement.

Assembly Chairman Jerry Peterson said faculty had been kept in the loop earlier this year when the Boulder campus began working with Coursera to offer MOOCs. But he learned about the new and broader deal between Coursera and the system on the day before the agreement was made public on Thursday.

“We don’t understand what the role of the faculty was in making this decision – yet,” Peterson said Thursday.

He said faculty at Boulder were comfortable with the four massive open online courses the university is offering with Coursera this fall, but he said Boulder professors were unsure what to make of the systemwide deal.

“The faculty accept those four as representative experiments,” Peterson said of the already planned effort. “Not all experiments are successful.”

Kathleen Bollard, the Colorado system’s vice president and academic affairs officer, worked with Coursera to put together the systemwide deal. During an interview ahead of the official announcement, she portrayed the effort as bubbling up from faculty demands. Peterson was not so sure.

“There are bubbles but I’m not sure how broad and large the bubbles are,” Peterson said. “There is a range of enthusiasm certainly and a willingness to do this, but there is a lot of skepticism.”

Michael Lightner, chair of electrical and computer engineering at Boulder, is a member of the task force. He said the new Coursera contract was not vetted carefully with most faculty beforehand, but he does believe it provides safeguards, in part because the contract itself "requires nothing" and leaves decisions in the hands of faculty.

"The faculty on the various campuses will be able to, if they wish, offer the courses and vet it and offer all the quality control and do everything they do now," he said. "The combination of those two, I think, leave faculty in complete control of what goes on, which I think is the best case scenario of what we could have had."

At West Virginia University, Faculty Senate Chairman Michael Mays talked with the university's administration ahead of time but said faculty have mixed feelings.

“As far as this announcement goes, I see that as something that is immediately positive, but as far as the rest of it, we’ll see how it goes,” he said.

For WVU and other universities, this week’s partnerships with Coursera meant they joined a once-elite club, at least as junior members. Coursera had a contractual obligations to primarily offer courses from members of the Association of American Universities or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America. (For instance, the Boulder campus was already working with Coursera because it is an AAU member, but the three other Colorado campuses were not allowed to until this week.) The company now has a different part of its website to house material from the less-than-elite state universities.

Mays compared this gradual rollout to other tech companies' expansions, particularly Facebook, which began as an exclusive social network for students at elite colleges and then expanded its reach. “It was only after it was pretty well-established at the college level that it became open to my mother,” Mays said of Facebook. He said being asked to join Coursera at this stage was a compliment.

Amy Neel, the Faculty Senate president at the University of New Mexico, said she had met with her university’s provost before the deal with Coursera was announced, though the senate itself never got a chance to look at the deal.

Neel said some departments may hope to use online courses to replace in-person courses, while others are more cautious. For instance, she said the computer science department had trouble finding adjuncts to teach the entry-level computer science course. The regular course could be replaced with a MOOC or some other type of online course.

Neel also hopes the university can use Coursera's online platform to reach students in New Mexico high schools who don't have access to good teachers in certain subjects. This could create chances for students to take dual credit courses.

“We’ve got a lot of rural high schools where kids don’t have access to good math and science education and I think this would be a fabulous way to ensure access to math and science in New Mexico,” she said.

Still, Neel hopes the university is deliberate in its dealings with Coursera.

“I hope we use them in a judicious and useful way, that we’re not just going after something shiny and new,” she said.

Gary Rhoades leads the department of education policy studies at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education. He said chasing the latest shiny thing is exactly what is happening in central offices across the country as presidents, under the gun to appear innovative, are signing deals with Coursera without consulting faculty.

“An ounce of deliberation is worth a pound of faddish imitation,” Rhoades said.

Indeed, it’s not clear that administrators were even deliberating with their own governing boards -- at least not in public. Ahead of this week’s coordinated announcement between Coursera and 10 systems or universities in nine states, a review of online agendas and meeting minutes from the 10 governing boards gave no indication the governing boards had publicly voted on whether or not to deal with Coursera, even though the contracts with Coursera could result in untold thousands of dollars changing hands.

“What is happening is a total failure to deliberate and a lack of consideration about not whether to do stuff but about whether it’s going to work and why are you doing it,” Rhoades said.

He said a good example of deliberation was a months-long process at Amherst College, which resulted in the faculty ultimately rejecting the chance to partner with edX, another major American MOOC provider.

While Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller has portrayed the company's entry into the non-elite market this week as a way to “move the needle” on higher education outcomes in America, Rhoades said he thinks it’s nothing more than an attempt by the venture capital-backed company to find revenue.

“Now they say, well, actually since there is so much money to be made in the bigger places, we ought to consider them too,” Rhoades said, referring to Coursera's previous aim to only work with elite institutions.